In comparing my blog entries with other students, I see mine are far less about code snippets and the homework assignments and generally less technical. Unfortunately, I think today will be another blog about my experiences and the surrounding thoughts and feelings. I’m not sure if this is good or bad. Perhaps I just need to do more of a mix.
Last week was the first week (sprint) of unit four “Machine Learning.” The topic covered was natural language processing or NLP. It was by far the hardest week yet. I gave the most serious consideration to abandoning the quest to be a data scientist. It activated my latent depression issues which is understandable considering what my alternative path would be.
The problems started Monday when we had to cut the careers lesson short due to the extra time needed to install and set up the necessary environment. We had to install a file which was 850 megabytes large. Problem is pip downloads and unpacks the file to /tmp. How big is /tmp on my computer? 1.6 gigabytes. Needless to say the install failed and it took me some time to figure out why. My problem solving OCD serves me well in some cases but this time it meant focusing on getting this installed rather than paying attention to lecture. And the week was downhill from there.
There were other issues such as a bug in my logic that I was unable to resolve and eventually had to seek help for. I’ve come to realize that I may not have the mental tools in place to adequately deal with adversity correctly. Namely I can become too flustered too easily for too long on tasks which I feel I should not have problems with. Despite my successes and accomplishments in the past each new trouble seems far larger than it is or should be. Their is occasional talk about “impostor syndrome” in the slack channels or lecture. What never gets mentioned is stereotype threat. It’s a related issue but something most at Lambda School don’t have to deal with. I suspect both of these mental flaws or weaknesses are plaguing me in the back of my mind. “Will this be the problem that exposes and breaks me?” I clearly need better coping strategies. I’ve tried pausing and trying to think of past similar situations when I succeeded. Positive self-talk the call it. But it seems old habits die hard. Maybe making a concrete list of past successes (I tend to remember bad more than good) would help.